/lit/ - Literature

>>16624325
Unironically become a communist.

Capital is basically the same thing as the gnostic idea of the demiurge: a blind, malevolent idiot god that creates and directs this fallen realm. It's an emergent phenomenon created from the collective activity and decisions of millions of people, but taking on an agency of its own that is apart from the desires of the owners of capital, and subordinating them to it its own will. But there is no "it." It's a nothing, just an outline of a thing. It isn't the numbers in the computers on Wall Street. It isn't even the collective will of the bourgeoisie. It's a metaphysical non-being brought into "being" by the market system, which nevertheless controls the world as though it were an actually existing dark god. We are all slaves to this terrible, dark god.

This also means that if capital is the demiurge, and the capitalists the high priests and servants, that implies there must be an opposite. As Moloch was created from the sum of the will of the bourgeoisie, a blind drive towards accumulation at all costs, perhaps the true God is the collective manifestation of mankind's better nature. Where Moloch is the will to dominate, to treat other people as tools to be used, then God is our drive to cooperate, the hatred of injustice, the will to liberate ourselves and our fellow humans.

Thus, the class struggle is not just physical, but spiritual. A holy crusade, and we communists are the faithful. Thus, Karl Marx was God's prophet, sent to light the way to liberation and to the fulfillment of mankind's promise.

But even if we are to fail, and the dialectic is broken once and for all, we can say at least that while our bodies were slaves to capital, our minds and souls remain free and we remain faithful to the true God, the god of love and fairness, of cooperation and justice, while the minds and souls of the capitalists are in the thrall of Moloch. I think you could call that a kind of spiritual salvation.

>>15709729
Yeah, that was what I was thinking.

AI safety boils down to designing objective functions that prevent the unwanted side effects of a simple objective function (like stamp collecting or profit seeking).

Capitalism's objective function clearly doesn't pass the AI safety test. It doesn't mean there couldn't be other socioeconomy systems with objective functions that reduce the detrimental side effects.

In terms of AI safety one would like artificial intelligences with an objective function similar to humans' i.e. incredible complex. Capitalism dumbs down humans' objective function into a simpler one, a proxy: profit seeking. Socialism tries to revert this by putting humans' complex objective function back into the socioeconomic system's foreground, reducing the unwanted side effects described in the OP.

>>15661199
>>15664189
He was right in that capitalism is a positive feedback control loop. The signals that run through this circuit are concrete labour and capital is the controller which allows abstract labour to be maximized at the output.

OP here. I've been thinking and I've come to the conclusion that

you can predict the problems within capitalism WITHOUT a Marxist analysis.

In other words, you can predict the problems within capitalism WITHOUT even knowing about its internal contradictions.

All you need to do is to classify capitalism as a general AI. Then, the general problems that Marx predicted become apparent if you know a bit of AI safety.

I think this is a big deal, you guys.